I was 20 years old and a senior undergraduate English major when I started tutoring at Southeast Community College’s writing center. To say that I was wet behind the ears is an understatement: I was not even remotely prepared for what turned out to be a very steady flow of ESL students, many of them refugees, coming to this small writing center in Lincoln, NE with papers full of war, persecution, poverty, discrimination, and grammatical errors. The most urgent (and embarrassingly basic) question I found myself having to confront was, “What matters, here?” The communication of certain truths about the world, the working-through of personal histories, and the recording of memory obviously trumped proper form and usage on my tutoring agenda, but I wasn’t quite sure how to enact this philosophy. I fumbled through that first year as a tutor, doing my best to negotiate the fine line between encouraging students to uninhibitedly develop content while simultaneously trying to explain linguistic anomalies and demystify the academic parameters in which they were working.
I was often discouraged by how exhausted I found myself after four- or five-hour shifts, disheartened by the confusion I would see on students’ faces, and disgusted by whatever failures in either myself or the academic system allowed students to stay confused. It seemed odd to have to spend twenty minutes explaining how (and why!) to cite sources in MLA style, for instance – knowing that that particular requirement was worth a ridiculous percentage of the overall grade, and was therefore critical to the student’s success in the class – while an essay about death sat unattended. What was my function, really? Was I hired to help students get A’s in their classes (meaning, in practical terms, that I would spend my days explaining MLA and APA formats, pointing out verb tense errors, and making sure that students were writing the kind of essay the teacher wanted)? Was I supposed to teach them how to write (and if so, what purpose did the class serve)? Was I an essay mechanic, coldly diagnosing and fixing the problems that interfered with comprehension in order of grievousness? Or was I allowed to build relationships with the “regulars,” and was tutoring as much about building trust as it was about writing? I didn’t know. “Peer tutor” was a rather undefined relational role, its complexity probably compounded by the fact that I was white, female, and half the age of most of these students.
That’s a lot of rambling, but the point is that Dr. Matsuda’s presentation on Thursday night was therapeutic. Brief rundown of memorable points: he reinforced my vague notion of a hierarchy of importance, specifying that communication is the key, a sentiment echoed by last week’s readings—language is about saying something, and tutors are there to help students do just that. Grammatical mistakes do require attention, but a tutor should feel free to give students space to self-correct because odds are good that students only need prompting to know when and where to revise. Some of the most linguistically perplexing aspects of any writer’s second language (i.e., idioms, prepositions,) require repetition; in fact, everything about learning to write in another language takes time (simple, yes, but comforting). Finally, the claim that I found to be most intriguing went something like this: “Being a member of a community is a goal and being a student if about socialization as well” (paraphrase.) Tutors should therefore help with socialization.
What do we make of this? What do we do with it?
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